2022 was a year without games. That’s one of the most common choruses circulating the internet this year. Clearly, this claim is as false as it is unfair. 2022 has seen a lot of fantastic games. Medieval murder mysteries, spectacular automated roguelikes, rhythm-based FPSs, erotic FMV thrillers, mini survival games and much more.
But it’s true that one type of game hasn’t really made an appearance this year, namely the glossy, expensive blockbuster. Of the handful of new big-budget games released on PC in 2022, only one, Elden Ring, managed to break a score of 90. Other than that it’s a poor choice. Modern Warfare 2 was passable, I think. A Plague Tale: Requiem was quite in the realm of blockbusters if you peer at it in the right light. PlayStation owners can brag about Horizon: Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarok, but apart from the fact that they didn’t come out on PC, two major console exclusives in an entire year isn’t exactly a strong hit rate. That said, it’s stronger than Microsoft, whose only new first party release *checks notes* was Pentiment.
Then we had the miserable disappointment that was Saints Row, while Gotham Knights was similarly a fart in a catsuit. Dying Light 2 also happened. Chris liked it. I certainly don’t. The end of the year was a little stronger, with Darktide and the Callisto protocol making for an expensive, creepy spectacle, though both launches were somewhat hampered by technical issues.
We all know the reason for this lack of blockbusters. It starts with a “P” and ends with “-andemic”. The delayed effect of Covid-19, which forced many studios to adapt to a work-from-home model, has had an effect a significant impact according to schedules. As a result, a number of games that were pipped for 2022 have made their way into 2023, including Starfield, Redfall, Suicide Squad, Forspoken, just to name a few.
But while the pandemic has exacerbated the problem, it’s not solely to blame for the meager supply of 2022. If anything, the pandemic has served as a convenient scapegoat for more systemic problems in the games industry. Making great games is becoming more and more demanding and developers are less and less willing to put up with the nonsense that comes with it.
To demonstrate this, let’s see what a big budget game in 2022 looks like. The industry standard is a huge, intricately detailed open world that offers dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of experiences. It needs lifelike characters, multiple fully realized towns and cities, a beautiful animated platform system, a combat system that can entertain players for hours. It needs a story that has hundreds of thousands of dialogues and hundreds of hours of voice acting. It will probably have a stealth system, and a crafting system, and a pseudo-RPG method of progression.
All of this is just to keep up with the Joneses, let alone bring players something new or better than what they’ve experienced before. It is worth noting that no each blockbuster games look like this, and indeed, one of the trends in gaming over the past decade has been a general narrowing of what both audiences and publishers consider “AAA”. Aside from a marketing term that PC Gamer isn’t a fan of. Nevertheless, the open-world blockbuster certainly represents the zeitgeist, and the games that don’t attribute to it will nonetheless adopt many of the ideas and mechanics commonly seen in open-world games.
Even if we reduce these games to what they are best known for – pushing the boundaries of graphics – the industry is experiencing increasingly diminishing returns. The visual difference between games made in 1992 and 2002 is stretched out. The difference between games made in 2012 and 2022? It’s still visible, but not nearly as dramatic. Achieving further graphical benefits requires a disproportionate amount of effort, as evidenced by the hardware requirements of ray tracing compared to the visual improvements the technology actually provides. That’s a bit of a problem when you’ve been luring players in with those exhilarating graphical leaps for the last 30 years.
Basically, it’s hard to impress the modern gaming audience, so to impress them requires significantly more effort. This means bigger budgets, bigger teams and significantly more time. It is generally believed that the standard development cycle for a modern blockbuster is four years (by comparison, Quake, the most advanced game of its time, took two years to develop, which was considered abnormal at the time). But many of these projects run past that four-year cycle. Rockstar was five years apart from releasing GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. CD Projekt had a five-year gap between The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. It took 343 six years to release Halo Infinite after Halo 5. Rocksteady Studios hasn’t released a game since 2015.
Now keep in mind that game developers are creative people, and generally creative people A) want other people to see their work and B) value their individualism and don’t like feeling like a cog in a giant machine. Therefore, it cannot be easy for any game designer to work with a team of hundreds of people on a small part of a huge game, which increasingly takes a minimum of four years. And that’s the best case scenario. You might be working on a game that gets canceled, or multiple games being canceled. And depending on what contracts you signed, you may not be able to talk about any of those projects – which could represent a decade of your life’s work – under penalty of persecution to oblivion.
Talk to any developer who has worked at a major studio and they’ll tell you that none of this is unusual – that’s how the industry works. We haven’t even gotten to the more unpleasant problems associated with game development. The infamous stories from creakthe death marchesthe constant reports as regards toxic management, or sexual abuse and Harassment. Oh, and there’s the fact that game developers are significantly underpaid compared to equivalent positions in other industries.
Across the board, developers are fed up with how the big-budget gaming industry treats them – whether it’s a result of mismanagement or simply the existing systems in play. Some are create trade unionswhile others are ordinary departing for greener pastures, forming their own studios or transitioning into other industries. As a result, the major studios are currently struggling to recruit the talent they need, probably the reason we’ve seen recently so many games announced extremely early in their development.
The slowing effect of the pandemic will hopefully fade until 2023. But the tough questions the industry has yet to answer remain. How long can big budget games continue to rely on technical fortitude? How does the industry prevent development cycles from spiraling further, while also reshaping itself to become a safer, fairer and more inclusive workspace? How long will players be amazed by huge open worlds, and what will the next wave of blockbusters eventually look like?